We were honored to host FedEx founder and chairman Fred Smith at our CTUP Economic Summit on Monday in New York City. This is an excerpt from some of his comments at the Summit and later from remarks at the Coolidge Foundation dinner:

When Federal Express began operations 50 years ago, on 17 April 1973, we served 25 cities and transported a whopping 186 packages the first night. Last Monday — Cyber Monday — FedEx picked up about 27 million packages in the United States and among the other 220 countries and territories we now serve. In addition, we transported over 110,000 freight shipments totaling more than 100 million pounds. As I stand here tonight, 18 jumbo FedEx freighters are crisscrossing the Atlantic; another 20 are doing the same across the vast Pacific; and still other Express freighters are flying along the spine of South America and between Asia and Europe and points in between. 

We estimate FedEx transports about 6% of the U.S. GDP every business day. A particularly dramatic example of our capabilities occurred in 2021 when FedEx moved about half of the new COVID-19 vaccines to every corner of the U.S. and over 50 countries around the world.

We were able to monitor each and every one of tens of millions of these life-saving shipments using FedEx proprietary Sense Aware devices, and our day-certain service reliability for these all-important vaccines exceeded 99.8%!

That’s an astonishing record of accomplishment. Contrast this with the government-run Postal Service that—like Amtrak— as nowhere a 98% on-time delivery record and loses money each year.